Target Of Opportunity

Gary Yourofsky

Gary Yourofsky is another Eco-terrorist to be employed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA). PeTA hired Yourofsky in 2002 as a "Humane Education Lecturer", with the expressed goal of putting him in front of college, high-school, and middle-school audiences. In his standard speech, Yourofsky compares himself to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Jesus Christ.

Yourofsky has been arrested over a dozen times for animal-rights crimes, and was sentenced in 1999 to six months in a Canadian maximum-security prison for a felony raid on a fur farm. Yourofsky proudly sports an Animal Liberation Front tattoo on his arm, except when he wears long sleeves for photo-ops. Before he was hired by PeTA's Ingrid Newkirk, he was the founder of a questionable Animal Rights Organization known as Animals Deserve Adequate Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT).

"It's not about loving animals. It's about fighting injustice. My whole goal is for humans to have as little contact as possible with animals."
-- Gary Yourofsky, founder of Animals Deserve Adequate Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT), now employed as PeTA's national lecturer

He is very right when he says, "It's not about loving animals."

In 2000 the Internal Revenue Service revoked ADAPTT of its (c) 3 status because of their involvement in and support of civil disobedience and direct action. That is another way of saying terrorist actions. Donations to ADAPTT are not tax-deductible! On the ADAPTT website, they consider their actions of civil disobedience and direct action to be "the most effective form of activism this movement has ever known."

"Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly. Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice of vivisection."
-- Gary Yourofsky, as interviewed by Claudette Vaughan in "The Gary Yourofsky Interview", The Abolitionist, 2005; self-quoted in "Animal rights and ethical veganism," University of South Indiana Shield, 24 January 2008.

Gary Yourofsky has been heard by more than 50,000 students in 160 middle schools, high schools and universities across the nation. Rhetoric like the above statement is what students around the country are hearing.

By hiring Domestic Terrorists like Gary Yourofsky, PeTA can no longer make the claim that they are a "Non-Violent" organization.